Press Release

We are very pleased to present selections from three new series of works by Los Angeles artists Lia Halloran, Britton Tolliver, and Masood Kamandy at Art Los Angeles Contemporary 2017. All three artists will be presenting solo exhibitions at the Gallery this Winter and Spring.

Lia Halloran's "Your Body is a Space That Sees" is a series of large-scale cyanotypes that source the fragmented history and contributions of women in astronomy. The series presents a visual account and female-centric astronomical catalog of craters, comets, galaxies and nebula drawing from narrative, imagery and historical accounts of a group of women known as 'Pickering's Harem', or the 'Harvard Computers', who worked at the Harvard Observatory starting in 1879. The key to unlocking the distance of the universe was discovered by one of these women, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, and was instrumental to the now famous theory by Edwin Hubble that the Universe is expanding. Halloran's work offers the experience of the night sky through the discoveries made by these under-recognized astronomers.

Britton Tolliver's paintings draw from the full range of abstraction's possibilities, fusing diverse positions and processes in hard-fought, deeply considered compositions. He has long been interested in the grid as a visual and conceptual structuring device, using it to accentuate the extremes of order and freedom that provide the foundations for his practice. In this new group of medium-sized paintings the grid has begun to close in on itself, leaving unexpected forms and radical figure/ground relationships in its wake. Tolliver's paintings speak to a nuanced relationship with the natural world. Their textured surfaces, notable for their depth of relief and seductive tactility, can be read as topographic maps or psychedelic scans of alien landscapes, while their high-contrast chromatic range can recall the lurid immediacy of Los Angeles sunsets.

Masood Kamandy continues using both software and photography as mediums for his artwork. His latest body of work explores photography as a democratic medium in both technique and subject matter. Created entirely on an iPhone using an experimental camera software that hedeveloped called Oblique, Kamandy creates beguiling views of a seemingly ordinary world. Reimagining what "in-camera" manipulation means, Kamandy's filters allow for real-time manipulation of his camera's view by compressing all editing into a single shutter press. Kamandy's goal with photography has always been to continually refresh his perception and to use the medium as a way of getting closer to the world around him. His new photographs are a wondrous combination of serendipity and intention.